Mass Effect Re-Play: Noveria Pt 1

This is the a series where Brie will recap and review the hit video game trilogy, “Mass Effect”. New posts will be published every Thursday and she will weekly stream (unscheduled) on twitch.tv, posting notifications on Qwerty’s facebook and twitter. Warning: These posts will be full of spoilers. You can start from the beginning here.

What Happened:

We head for Noveria and meet some resistance before even arriving, Joker cracks one about wanting to take his next shore leave here. Once we do land we find that they are even more resistant to our being on the planet and even try to take our weapons, which does not go as they plan. Once we speak with Gianna Parasini (the assistant to Administrator Anoleis) we find that their excuse for such tight security is high profile corporate clientele that they are very quick to protect, but since you’re Spector they allow us to conduct our business.

We find out from Gianna right away that Matriarch Benezia passed through within the last couple of days, but moved on to Peak 15. However, first we need to get clearance from Anoleis to leave. Gianna directs us where to go and we make our way to his office.

Again, we meet resistance to our mission and to our even being on Noveria. Anoleis does provide us with some information about ambiguous crates that Benezia brought with her, but find that bribery will be the best way to get the garage pass that we need.

On our way out Gianna informs us that she has another way we might be able to get what we need and suggests we speak with Lorik Qui’in up in the bar. We make our way up to said bar to find Lorik and find out from him that his offices are currently being ransacked by Anoleis’s “hired goons”. Lorik lets us know that this is actually due to incriminating evidence he discovered about Anoleis that the Administrator is now illegally trying to retrieve. He asks us to secure the evidence for him and in return he will provide us with his garage key. We also get a warning that we may meet some more “resistance” from the thugs.

After a short elevator ride we arrive at Lorik’s offices and convince the first couple of officers to leave and that if they forget we were there illegally, we would forget they were there illegally; unfortunately we don’t have the option to convince any of the other security officers of that, and have to kill them all.

We locate the important evidence and make to return to Lorik, but are stopped by Gianna wanting to talk to us in the bar before we speak to Lorik again. Once we find her again we learn that she is actually from Internal Affairs and has been under cover investigating Anoleis for six months. She asks us to convince Lorik to testify against Anoleis and assures us that if we do, she will provide us with a garage pass or whatever we may need.

With a little persuasion Lorik sees the sense in testifying and we deliver the good news to Gianna back in her offices; she immediately arrests Anoleis, but not before providing us with the garage pass.

Finally we’re able to get into the garage only to be met by Geth forces. We take down a couple of destroyers and a stalker and then hear the shock in Maeko Matuso’s voice and her disbelief when we try to tell her that all this ruckus was Geth. We surmise this must be what Benezia had in her crates and that there must be dozens or hundreds of Geth now on Noveria. We get into the Mako provided, and head out of the garage into the Level 1 Hazard that is the snow of Noveria.

Quote of the Day:

“I think I’ve got snow in my boots.” – Kaidan

Not particularly profound, but it gave me a really deep chuckle. I accidentally triggered him while exiting the ship, and this is what came out. Random, and very funny.

Commentary:

I always build these missions up as more difficult or more time consuming in my mind for some reason. I don’t know why, but I thought this first part of Noveria was much longer, but I only played for an hour and still dicked around a lot.

I also forgot at first that I should have Liara in my party and thus had to run back to the ship when Kaidan so kindly suggested we bring her a long. I mean, she’s probably going to want to see her mommy.

And can we talk about this face for a second???

Never mind, I really don’t think much has to be said about it, but seriously… Just look at it.

Looook at iiiiittttt….

In other news I was able to get my xbox 360 controller to work with the game on Steam and things went MUCH more smoothly. I’m really glad that this worked out, I was not enjoying the normal PC controls. Something about having the buttons and joysticks are just so much more comforting and relaxing.

Here’s the video from this session. I trolled around some planets for a little bit in the beginning and took down a Thresher Maw.

The next part of the Noveria mission is what scares me. Those damn buggies just jump out at you!

Brie is a fair-weather foodie. She wouldn’t go as far as to say she has a love/hate relationship with food, because she loves food and food clearly loves her; it loves her so much that it holds on as tight as it can and never lets go; mostly in the middle region. Her cooking style involves a lot of butter or garlic or onions, things that have “creamy” or “cheesy” in the title, also anything that you could add bacon to. She’s been making the noms since she was tall enough to reach the counter, and has been eating for even longer*. Brie’s passion for cooking-slash-baking will fluctuate however, usually correlating with how sick she is of doing dishes. Never-the-less, her passion for eating (sushi, take out Chinese, hole in the wall diner-y type foods) is as constant as the sun, the moon, death, and taxes. She also sometimes talks in the third person; don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.*Fun Fact: When she was 10-13ish, only 1 out of every 5 batches of sugar cookie dough would make it past the butter/sugar stage and end up in the oven instead of Brie’s stomach. #ThisIsWhyI’mFatP.S. She also set the microwave on fire during the same era while making home-made microwavable popcorn. Pro tip: Alton Brown is WRONG and you cannot put a paper bag with staples into the microwave; things will go badly.P.P.S Happy ending. Even though to put out the fire she threw a bowl of water onto it and shorted all the circuits, the microwave started working after a week and her mom was non-the-wiser.P.P.P.S But, I guess not any longer…

Brandie is wife to Adam who is brother to Brie who is cousin to Cat! With our powers combined, we represent a culinary school grad, an aspiring astronaut, a culinary school dropout, social nerds, gamers, cinephiles, bibliophiles, laqueristas, food fanatics, social anxiety disorders, and more. It’s fun stuff.